20.08 enhancements

Revamped screens for work orders and incidents

Smart IT now uses the industry standard Progressive Web App (PWA) technology for the work order and incident screens. You can customize these screens in Remedy Developer Studio in a similar way that you customize the mid tier screens.
The new approach offers a lot of flexibility for developing a dynamic modern UX for incident and work order management that fits exactly your needs, as compared to the legacy Smart IT approach, which does not allow for customizations and extensions.
You can opt in to enable the Progressive Web Apps screens for work orders and incidents.

For more information, see:

• Progressive Web Application screens in Smart IT
• Enabling the Progressive Web Application screens
• Progressive web application development (Remedy AR System documentation)
• Learning about Work Order Management
• Learning about Incident Management

Relate task or task group templates to incident templates

In Remedy IT Service management, when you create a new incident template or modify an existing incident template, you can relate task or task group templates to the incident template by using the new Task Templates tab. In Smart IT, when you use such incident templates to create an incident, the related task or task group templates automatically become available on the Tasks tab. This helps you to reduce the time taken to create an incident that requires several tasks or task groups. For more information, see Creating a ticket from the Create New menu and Relating task templates with incident templates .

New configuration parameter for debug logging in Centralized configuration

Instead of using logback.xml, now you get the debug logging, by using a newly-introduced log.level configuration parameter, Centralized configuration.

Indicate Chat as the reported source for incidents and work orders

The Reported Source field includes Chat as a source for incidents and work orders. For any ticket that an agent creates directly from a chat, the Chat option is selected automatically in the Reported Source field.

The Reported Source field is not visible by default in incidents and work orders. However, you can add this field to views and use this field to generate reports.

For information about adding custom fields to your views, see Adding custom fields to your views using Smart IT.

Automatically assign tickets created from BMC Live Chat

Incidents or work orders in Smart IT that are created from a BMC Live Chat conversation are automatically assigned to the agent who last handled that chat conversation. This eliminates the support agent's manual efforts to assign tickets to self. 

To learn how auto assignment works with tickets created from BMC Live Chat conversations, see Assigning tickets in Smart IT.

To learn how to enable automatic assignment of BMC Live Chat tickets to the logged in agent, see Configuring automatic ticket assignments.

To learn how to set the default support group for a company, see  Setting the default support group for a company (BMC Live Chat documentation).

Ability to submit a service request from Digital Workplace Catalog in Smart Recorder

Your service desk agents can submit service requests on behalf of a customer by using a Digital Workplace Catalog in Smart Recorder.

For more information, see, Submitting service requests

Introduction of an attention flag to define the priority of work

When your support agents access Smart IT Dashboard, or Ticket Console, they see an attention flag in all Incident and Work Order tickets that need their attention to work on priority basis. To make this feature available for the support agents, the administrators need to configure the showNeedsAttentionFlag parameter in Centralized configuration.

For more information, see Deciding which ticket to work on next.

Relate task or task group templates to incident templates

When you create a new incident template or modify an existing incident template, you can relate task or task group templates to the incident template by using the new Task Templates tab. When you use such incident templates to create an incident, the related task or task group templates automatically become available on the Tasks tab. This helps you to reduce the time taken to create an incident that requires several tasks or task groups.

For more information, see Relating task templates with incident templates .

Indicate Chat as the reported source for incidents

The Reported Source field includes Chat as a source for incidents. For any ticket that an agent creates directly from a chat conversation, the Chat option is selected automatically in the Reported Source field. You can also use this field to generate reports.

For more information, see:

• Creating an incident request record without a template
• Using qualifications to generate a report

Performance improvement for Report Design with Calculated Field

The following enhancements are made to the calculated fields:

• At the time of creating a calculated field either in a view, or during a report creation, the user can select the return data type of the formula from the Resulting Field Type drop down list. The supported data types are Numeric, Text, Boolean, and Date. For more information, see Performing calculations on fields in a report.
• At the time of creating a calculated field either in a view, or during a report creation, if the user selects the Resulting Field Type such as Numeric, Text, Boolean, or Date, the SQL formula skips validation, thereby improving the performance.
  

Performance improvement for broadcasting through email 

You can send a report with same data to multiple recipients through a single email as a carbon copy instead of multiple emails. This eliminates the need to run report for each recipient separately, thereby improving the performance of Remedy Smart Reporting application. Enable this functionality by running a query that puts all the recipients into the CC field instead of the To field of the email. For more information, see Broadcasting with recipients in the CC field.

View the status of previous executions of Broadcasts from the Admin Console

You can view the status of previous executions of a scheduled task for the last 30 days from the Admin Console, to see if the tasks were executed successfully or failed. For content delivering tasks such as broadcast reports, a list of recipients is maintained for each execution. You can use this list to track which users received the content successfully. If the content delivery fails for any user, you can also view the error message for the failed delivery. For more information, see Managing scheduled broadcast tasks.

Check data connectivity by enabling volatile data source settings

If the data source connectivity fails for any reason, it can cause various tasks to fail for that time period, such as execution of a report, loading a dashboard, running broadcasts. Due to this, users need to manually refresh the reports, dashboards, or rerun the broadcasts. To overcome this issue, a Remedy Smart Reporting administrator can enable the volatile data source capability. For more information, see Checking for volatile data source connections. 

Additional capabilities for viewing the audit history of a CI

As a consumer of CI data, you can view the audit history of a CI from the search results of the CI.  You can enable audit for a class and for the attributes of the CI by using Class Manager.

For more information, see Auditing changes to CIs.

Create federated classes in the new Class Manager

A configuration manager can define a federated class that can fetch data stored outside the CMDB. You can then view the data from within the CMDB. For more information, see Retrieving federated data stored externally by creating federated classes.

Configure federated plug-ins in the CMDB Portal

To create a federated class, you also need plug-ins to allow for CMDB to fetch data from JDBC-compliant or AR System databases. For more information, see Creating AR or JDBC federated data plug-ins to access data external to the CMDB.

Create additional activities in a reconciliation job

You can create Compare, Copy, Execute, and Delete activities in a reconciliation job. You can define the data that must be used in these activities. For more information about creating activities in a reconciliation job, see:

• Identifying changes to CIs by using the Compare activity
• Copying CIs from one dataset to another
• Running reconciliation jobs in a sequence by using the Execute activity
• Deleting CIs from a dataset by using the Delete activity

Developing custom progressive web applications in Remedy AR System

You can create and view your custom application as a progressive web application (PWA) simply by selecting and using Progressive views in Remedy Developer Studio.

A progressive web application can work with multiple types of clients—Browser, Android, and iOS devices. PWAs provide a more modern and attractive user interface. They are responsive, use less data, have low development costs, offer an engaging user experience, faster loading times, and help you increase conversions, page visits, and session length.

For more information, see Progressive web application development.

Remedy Email Engine support for EWS protocol for OAuth 2.0 authentication for Microsoft Office 365 (Exchange)

Remedy Email Engine supports Modern Authentication, along with Basic Authentication, for the Exchange Web Services (EWS) protocol to access Microsoft Office 365 (Exchange). The Modern Authentication is based upon OAuth 2.0 for authentication and authorization.

For more information, see Configuring basic outgoing mailbox properties and Configuring basic incoming mailbox properties.

Support for case insensitive configuration in PostgreSQL database

Remedy ITSM Suite 20.08 supports the deployment of case insensitive type of PostgreSQL configuration that offers flexibility when querying the PostgreSQL database.

Ability to automatically change the Row-level security (RLS) algorithm to Subquery option

Use the arrls command on the RLS-enabled forms to automatically set the RLS algorithm to Subquery.  Setting the Subquery algorithm facilitates to fetch search results faster. The arrls command checks the new entries in the AR System:RLS Autodiscovery form and in the flat file.

The arrls command has the following syntax:

[-u] [-p] [-x] [-t] [-file] [-algo]

For more information, see The arrls command .

Signing hash algorithm for SAML realm

In previous releases, SAML authentication by default supported a single SHA1 hash algorithm. Starting with this release, SHA1 and SHA256 are supported. As a Remedy SSO administrator, you must specify which hash algorithm is used for a realm to sign requests or metadata with SAML authentication. You must specify the Signing Algorithm field by selecting a hash algorithm type and key type. For more information about this setting, see Importing configuration from an identity provider and configuring SAML.

Interactive self-help enabled by default

In earlier releases, interactive self-help was disabled by default. In this version, guided assistance is enabled by default. For information about how to change the default behavior, see Configuring settings for Remedy SSO administrators.